Third Rail Rep review: Who says comedy's not pretty? 'Penelope' is a beaut

Owen CareySurvival of the fittest: Michael O'Connell, Bruce Burkhartsmeier and Tim True tussle over truth and beauty in Third Rail Rep's production of Enda Walsh's "Penelope."

Ah, such a life. Spending all your days at the pool, drinking and hanging out with the guys, jousting and jockeying with one another to grab the attention of the beautiful woman nearby.

But what if it’s all and only a savage game, and nothing matters but winning? Things could get ugly.

Or what if, on the other hand, there’s something more to be considered than this grubby everyday tussle, a level of higher ideals -- kindness, friendship, honesty, love?

Such weighty questions about the human condition are at the heart of “Penelope,” a play by the antic Irish dramatist Enda Walsh, getting an audaciously engaging production by Third Rail Rep. But what you’ll notice first are the Speedos.

Walsh wrote the play when a German theater company asked him for a contemporary take on Homer’s epic poem “The Odyssey,” and he zeroed in on the ill-fated suitors who spend years wooing Penelope, only to be slaughtered by her husband Odysseus when he returns from decades of war and travel. Here, all but four of the suitors have done away with themselves even before that grisly fate, and we find these holdouts, paunchy and swim-suited, in a drained pool outside Penelope’s house. And they sense their time is short.

“We are (doomed) and no amount of comedy is going to lessen that fact!” one of Walsh’s characters cries. (We’ve cleaned up the quote for you, gentle reader, but expect no such niceties from Walsh’s language, or -- for that matter -- from the mold-and-blood smeared surfaces of Demetri Pavlatos' striking scenic design.)

Actually comedy is in such high gear here that grim fate and existential uncertainty are an awful lot of fun. Well, watching others experience them is, anyway.

As smart and barbed as Walsh’s writing is, by turns touchingly poetic and hilariously crass, it helps immensely that we’re watching a tight-knit cast of Third Rail stalwarts, directed by Philip Cuomo, adept at riding the line that darts here between hammy theatricality and psychological understatement.

Tim True, as the bloviating Dunne, is the funniest, pumping colorfully hot air into his ludicrous attempts at seduction. Michael O’ Connell plays the egocentric and domineering Quinn with an air that’s part clubhouse bully, part lothario in decline, an alpha male for the sake of vanity. (Quinn also has the most extravagant strategy for gaining Penelope’s attention, but that’s a plot development better left unspoiled -- save for necessary kudos to Jamie Hammon for her speed-demon wardrobe work.)

Subtler is Bruce Burkhartsmeier’s turn as Fitz, the representative of effete intellectual escapism (he’s reading Homer), who woos with honest emotion, but only out of panic. Chris Murray as Burns is the weakling voice of conscience, arguing for a goodness that transcends their ceaseless competition.

They tease and scrap, banter and backstab, buddies in semi-civilized brutality. But that’s just the way it is, when you’re fighting like hell for a little piece of heaven.